


Stop all the clocks

by jspringsteen



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bisexual Male Character, Closeted Character, Complete, Introspection, M/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-14 07:00:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13584762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jspringsteen/pseuds/jspringsteen
Summary: Back home in Mobile, Eugene mourns the past, Sid pretends, and Mary believes. One scene, three points of view.





	1. The Mourner

_He was my north, my south, my east and west,_  
_My working week and Sunday rest,_  
_My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song._  
_I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong._

-W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues

\---

Eugene longs to disappear into the night; to spread his arms in his black suit jacket and let the wind carry him into the velvet darkness, like the evening bat.

He has stepped outside the crowded house where music, conversation and laughter all swirl together into an unintelligible buzz, into the night with its audience that softly flutters, rustles and chirps, and receives the cool night air on his face with a grateful sigh. He doesn’t know how many times he’s debated simply walking out tonight and leaving the party altogether – probably well over fifty times. It feels good to finally have done it.

Colourful lanterns hanging from tree branches stretch away from him down the driveway like a string of glow worms, the light picking out couples walking arm in arm under the swaying Spanish moss. There’s a warm breeze, swollen and heavy with the scent of summer flowers – not the stench of rotting vegetation and decaying flesh, which, when he catches an unexpected whiff of it now and then, has the power to transport him back thousands of miles across the ocean in a flash. Eugene inhales deeply as he takes out his pipe and packs it, lights it, and watches the fragrant smoke curl upwards.

“I saw you makin' a break for it.”

He turns around when he hears Sid’s voice. He descends the steps carefully, balancing two glasses of punch, brass buttons and golden thread glistening in the soft light of the lanterns. Eugene accepts the glass and looks at Sid in his uniform, feeling distinctly like a jackdaw next to a blue jay.

“We’ll have to drink fast,” says Sid, demonstrating this immediately by taking a large gulp of punch, “before Mary finds me and she’ll have me dancing all night.” He shakes his head with a mischievous grin. “Well, truth be told. If I didn’t like to dance I wouldn’t marry someone so hot to trot.”

Eugene smiles, but doesn’t drink. “You see, that’s why I’m a bachelor. I don’t dance until Eugene Sledge wants to dance.”

“And do you? Want to dance?” Sid asks him, a playful smile on his lips. He extends his hand mockingly. Eugene bats it away with a grin. “Wonder what they’d think if they saw us waltzin’ out here all by ourselves.”

Sid makes no reply, but looks at him, his smile disappearing. “Before the war, we could barely look Mary Houston in the eye,” he says, musingly. “Now it’s gotta be one of the two—bachelor or husband. No inbetween.” He looks down into his glass, the corners of his mouth quirking up with secret pleasure. “I tell you, it ain’t no mean thing to be the latter. Boy, I love that girl.”

Eugene draws on his pipe and stares down the driveway. He thinks about the last stroll they took in the woods together, boys still, before he saw Sid off on the train to Atlanta the next morning. If the years of his childhood could be condensed into one picture, a snapshot, that would be it—he with his nose in a book, and Sid busy whittling a birch branch, or chewing a blade of grass and staring at the clouds, or dipping his toes in the clear stream that wound between the trees. There they are, roaming through the undergrowth and the fields, sometimes accompanied by Deacon, first a puppy, then grown; first with handmade bows and arrows, then with stolen bottles of beer; first with the poise and bluster of insecure teenagers, then with the relief of leaving their parents’ stifling living rooms to walk and talk freely with the only person who understood them. And now the picture changes, to show two grown men of twenty-three with scars on their souls, one who wears his uniform with pride and one who wishes he could burn it.

Eugene has ventured out a few times since his return to Mobile, walking the same paths and wishing he could rediscover that feeling of having unlimited time at his disposal and the whole green and golden world before him, while still ignorant of the fact that there are islands like Peleliu and Okinawa where people come only to die. He thought he would come back to the same Mobile he visited in his dreams during the war, to a life, a happiness that now seems impossibly beyond his reach. Pretty soon, he thinks, as he looks at Sid, there’ll be a baby Phillips along, and Sid and he will find jobs and see each other only on weekends, at the bar or in the smoking room in their respective houses ( _his_ future house has one, at least) on Saturday nights; and be made to sit through each other’s family dinners while their wives gossip and their children kick each other under the table.

It’s such a depressing vision that anger flares up in him quickly and unannounced. Where, he wonders, does all of it leave time for _them_? For them to pick up where they left off, to walk in the woods together, to sit in the ice cream parlour and talk for hours about everything and nothing, to lie in the grass next to each other and reminisce about the brilliant palette of the sunsets over the Pacific ocean, remembering that brief moment when their world was teetering and they didn’t know which way it was going to fall? He used to think fighting would be the hardest thing he’d ever done. Now he realizes it’s moving on from the past, from Sid, instead.

“How did all this happen, Sid? I mean, looking at us. Sittin’ at a dance, drinkin’ punch. Not a scratch on either of us.” Sid lowers his eyes and stares into his glass. “And why,” Eugene can barely stop the torrent of words from bubbling up inside him, “why did we make it back here when all those other fellas didn’t?” _To live? What sort of way to live is that, with guilt and shame as its price?_

He sighs. Sid looks up again. He says, “Let’s take a walk.”

They leave their glasses on the steps and wander down the drive, heading towards the dusky recesses between the trees with their hands tucked into their pockets.

“I thought that,” Sid says. He kicks at a stone with his shiny black boot. “Every guy back has thought that. But you just gotta pull yourself out of bed in the morning, and get on with the day. You do that enough times in a row…” They stop underneath a tree. The buttons on his uniform seem to be illuminated.

“…you forget some things.” They’re standing close together, and Sid lowers his voice.

“For a while, anyway,” he adds. Eugene studies his face, which is half in the shadows. Sid looks past him, the way he did when they sat together on the beach on Pavuvu; when he’d replied with a boast about sleeping with a girl in Melbourne as an improbable answer to Eugene’s question _what it was like_ , being in battle, even though he was the one who had folded down the corner on a poem in _Barrack Room Ballads_ that warns the prospective soldier against catching cholera, getting a sunstroke, letting other soldiers run off with your girlfriend and losing your nerve in battle, and a host of other misfortunes. _Bad, bad, bad for a soldier. Fool, fool, fool of a soldier._

How they all still thought of the Japanese as buck-toothed paper soldiers then, to be crushed under the heroic American boot. How obvious Sid’s transformation was, having been to the place Eugene couldn’t imagine, and spit back out; the place where bullets conversed, men rested and told the best dirty jokes in the world, and your armpits would be drenched in cold sweat before the old stains had had a chance to dry up. Sid didn’t mention the girl again, instead offering him a cigarette and displaying a new carelessness for animals—even vermin like landcrabs—that Eugene was afraid betrayed a calloused heart. Sid had had a hard war. _Hadn’t they all?_

“Did you read the book I gave you?” he asks. “Kipling?”

Sid, who has been lost in contemplation, cracks a smile. “I, uh, tried. Unfortunately it was no longer in good shape after some of the rain we caught on Guadalcanal… I read lots on Pavuvu, though. There was a guy runnin’ a library… There’s one poem I remember, though. The one with all them British words in.”

Eugene smiles. He can picture Sid struggling through the page full of Cockney slang, the words cut off by apostrophes scattered as liberally across the page as thrips on a window in late August.

He wants to ask Sid everything—if he, too, feels like he is running behind, still trying to catch up with the new world that has suddenly turned them into men, still struggling to think of words to define what they’ve done and seen back in the Pacific. ‘Shellshock’ doesn’t cover the fretful moment of unfamiliarity and the grasp for recollection when he wakes up on his own in the morning, trying to decode when and where he is; nor the terrified helplessness he used to feel when caught in an artillery barrage, his hearing dulled from bomb blasts and projectiles singing overhead; nor the faint clarion call of morality when he walked past rows of Japanese corpses, which insisted that this was wrong on some level, but weakly, so weakly, because it was the war, and nothing they did made sense to him then or now. Just as he cannot now find the words to articulate how he feels, lacking the vocabulary for this uncharted territory they now find themselves in. And so he settles into the silence between them, though he desperately wants to break it.

“Sidney?” they hear Mary’s voice call out from the house. Sid looks over his shoulder and makes as if to go, but Sledge grabs his arm. He doesn’t need to say anything; Sid meets his gaze, and steps back under the tree. The silence is the silence of four years ago, when he saw Sid off at the station and hugged him – more a quick slap on the back, really – and they looked at each other, and Eugene had just worked up the nerve to say “I’ll miss you” when the whistle of the train blew and Sid said, “Well,” and hoisted his bag on his shoulder and boarded the train.

He thinks about running down the beach to the docks on Pavuvu, watching the ship carrying Sid away while he remained behind. _Five minutes,_ they’d said. _You just missed him_.

Sid takes a deep breath. “I saw one of our own men strangle a Jap, Gene. With his bare hands. It was so slow… we saw the life leaving his body. And that Marine… he just _smiled._ Grinned, more like. As if he’d done the world a service.” He shudders, looks away for a moment. “At that point… I knew I wanted to become a doctor. To add lives to the world rather than take them away.”

Eugene remains silent, unwilling to interrupt Sid’s confession. Fragments of music and laughter drift towards them, muffled by the heavy curtain of the night. He sees Mary throw up her hands and go back inside.

“I don’t know if I believe it,” Sid says, his voice a whisper. He is close enough that Eugene can feel his breath on his cheek.

“It’s what the doctor says. What my parents say. What they all say. ‘Just get out of bed, go to work, marry a nice girl, and you’ll be over it in no time.’ But I miss…” He looks away, then back at Eugene, earnestly. His pupils are huge and dark.

“I miss the laughter… Shooting the shit before lights out… Drinking Jap wine under a palm tree. I miss…” Eugene freezes when Sid puts his hand on his shoulder and squeezes softly. Feeling him tense up, Sid lifts it again, looking at Eugene questioningly. Eugene shakes his head, _it’s okay,_ and reaches up to take Sid’s hand, and lets his own rest on top of it. Sid smiles, and whispers, “Isn’t it weird how you just used to touch each other all the time? Sleep together, shit together, smoke together – hell, no such thing as privacy in the Marine Corps. And here…” He trails off, so Eugene can fill in the blanks. A fiercer love for his buddies he has never felt. Except, of course – he realizes with a start – what he feels for Sid.

“Maybe we should start writing to each other again.” Sid smiles, his eyes searching Eugene’s face. “The guys used to call you my old lady. Ever faithful with your letters.” Eugene swallows a lump that has gathered in his throat.  

“I used to read them out loud,” Sid continues. “They always made me feel calm.” He studies Gene from below heavy lids, the punch doing its work. “They all wanted to hear about the little porcelain boy with his murmuring heart, safely back home, while we were getting’ shot at and shouted at on the daily. You were on my mind…”

His voice is barely above a whisper now, and Eugene realizes he is holding his breath. “I liked how you signed them, ‘Your humble and obedient servant’. I always knew you wanted to live in the nineteenth century, with your Thoreau and all that.” Sid moves his thumb to sweep along Eugene’s collar bone, and he inhales sharply.

“I thought there was no way in hell they was gonna let you into the Corps, not with the fightin’ we’d seen.” He moves his hand slowly up to Eugene’s neck, then touches his trembling fingers to the side of his face. Eugene remains still, though he feels as if his heart might thump out of his chest. Sid’s eyes burn with an emotion he can’t decipher, but he has known it to be hiding behind his usually rakish grin from the moment he stepped off the train and faced Sid leaning up against his car. What it is, he still can’t say precisely – only that Sid seemed afraid to touch him, even to shake his hand. When they’d seen each other on Pavuvu he’d had the feeling that Sid couldn’t _stop_ —knocking him over in the sand, punching or pinching him, ruffling his hair—as if he was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t dreaming. But he could barely look at him. And now, he has felt Sid’s eyes following him around all night, with no accompanying touch. Until now.

“I used to think about our lives,” he says, still not meeting Eugene’s eyes, “a life pretty much like this. Dances, drinking, peace… And it was the thought of the happiness, the thought of this life, that’s what kept me going. I had an idea of…” Eugene doesn’t dare mention the girl from Melbourne, doesn’t even want to utter Mary’s name – it makes his heart burst, almost, to know that Sid missed him as he did, and now feels the canyon between them widening. Unable to dance together, or act in the boyish, innocent way they used to.

“An idea of happiness,” Sid finishes.

Eugene remembers the conversation he had with Bob Leckie, on the night he arrived and went to borrow a book. “God created the Japs too, right?” Leckie had said, cynically, and called him a “believer” in that same tone of voice.

“I believed,” Eugene says softly. “I believed I’d come home.” He hesitates before he adds, “to you.” He draws in a breath, then leans in and touches his lips to Sid’s.

Just when he thinks Sid won’t respond, and means to retreat, Sid tilts his head slightly and parts his lips. Eugene isn’t sure what to do—he’s never kissed anyone before—but Sid appears happy to take the lead. He moves his other hand to Eugene’s face too, cupping his cheeks, and their mouths move together in a rhythm that sends a shiver down Eugene’s spine. He feels a neediness behind his kisses, almost a desperation. Sid’s skin burns under his fingers. What he wants, he realizes, desperately, is to tether Sid to him in any which way, to keep him from floating away to Mary, a job, a family, a life without him.

He doesn’t realise he is crying until he feels Sid wipe away his tears with his thumb, and the warm touch of his lips gone.

“What’s wrong?” Sid whispers, but Eugene doesn’t know how to begin to tell him about the jumble of his thoughts. He wipes his cheeks, draws in a shuddery breath, and says,

“I don’t want to lose you.” It sounds vulnerable, more vulnerable than he has ever felt.

“Lose me? You mean… to Mary?” Sid holds him clasped against his chest, with Eugene’s head resting on his shoulder. He knows he can’t stay in 1945 forever; he knows, as Sid says, he has to reintegrate into the circle, and ignore the potholes the war has struck out on the road, and bear with the constant hobble of the wheels. But nature, like time, cares for no one; the holes will gradually fill up again as the years cycle round. The memories and experiences that have become lodged in his mind, which he has been trying to paint over or give new names to, will wear themselves down eventually and lose their meaning. Even Mobile, Alabama is changing, renewing itself. He could never look at it the same way again. And now, as he had suspected, it turns out Sid can’t either. To go through the motions, long enough for some things to be forgotten, isn’t enough.

“What makes you think you’ll lose me?” Sid whispers.

He doesn’t know how to answer that. Somewhere above them, an owl hoots mournfully.

Then, ringing out across the lawn, comes the cry: “Sidney Phillips!”

He feels Sid loosen his arms around him, and cup his cheek with one hand.

“I have to go,” Sid whispers. Eugene nods.

He watches Sid walk into the driveway, breaking into a jog when he sees Mary standing at its beginning. They embrace. Bats dive and dip in the sparse light. He hears the voice again:

_Five minutes. You just missed him._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to Claire for being my beta :-)  
> I'm planning to write two more chapters, so stay tuned for that.  
> The poem Eugene mentions is "The Young British Soldier" from Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads, which Eugene gives to Sid on the show.


	2. The Believer

“ _‘The moonlight will be the same here as there; in Russia too, and France, everywhere; and the trees will look the same as here, and people will meet under them and make love just as here. Oh! Isn't it stupid, the war? – as if it was not good to be alive.’_  
  
_He wanted to say: ‘You can't tell how good it is to be alive till you're facing death, because you don't live till then. And when a whole lot of you feel like that – and are ready to give their lives for each other, it's worth all the rest of life put together.’ But he couldn't get it out to this girl who believed in nothing._ ” – John Galsworthy, _Tatterdemalion_

\---

She’s glad Eugene has come to her party, she really is. The way Sid’s face lit up when he ambled in – curious, she’d thought, he wasn’t wearing his dress blues – could almost have dimmed the light that sprang in shards off the chandelier. From their school days she remembered Eugene as a strange, fragile-looking boy with a mop of fiery hair, shy but interesting, always with his nose in a book. On the few occasions she’d walked with him to their next class he would always pause in front of the biology classroom, where overgrown tropical plants pressed their leaves against the glass as if begging to be let out, and would point out some peculiarity about this leaf and that stem, or exchange a wave with Mr Milton, who lorded over his biology lab like God over Paradise. Mary had thought him and Sid mismatched at first, this lanky ginger and this strapping blond Southern beau, but at fifteen, when boys began hanging out with boys and girls with girls, she saw less and less of them both. She could remember feeling shocked when she ran into them on the street just before the war, both tall, both handsome, and she’d had to blink twice to see it was them. She could remember blushing under Sidney’s intense gaze, whereas Eugene just gave her a friendly smile, and just like that, they began hanging out regularly when Sid went off to war. She liked the easygoing way he had with her, with girls in general, a far cry from the predatory air of many of her classmates.

But now Eugene is at her party, and he’s moping.

He volunteered for the Marines, she knows that; so why won’t he wear his dress blues? The lamplight bounces off the gleaming buttons of Sid’s jacket and the other uniforms in the room, but Eugene remains in the corner, arms crossed in front of his regular tie, and regular shirt. She sees Sid beckon him over; he pushes himself off against the wall, as if rising from a sickbed, she thinks, and makes his way over to them. Behind him, the door opens and sweeps in a draught that makes the hair on her arms stand up momentarily.

“Champagne, Eugene?” she asks him, picking up a glass from a passing tray. He shakes his head. “No thanks, Mary.” She shrugs, and takes a sip herself.

“I got a letter from Burgie.” Eugene addresses Sid. They begin talking about an old war buddy of theirs, or no, just Eugene’s, who has gotten married to an Australian girl who is a friend of someone Sid knows. She notices Sid asks eagerly how her friend is—what was her name?—and glances around the room, smiling at Mrs O’Donehy, who has just come in and immediately started flapping her large hands to cool herself off.

“—Japs got him on Peleliu,” she hears Eugene say.

So, here’s death. Eugene has brought it right in the middle of her party, plonked it down like a suitcase, and walked away, leaving it for others to trip over. She looks around; the roses on the table seem to her instantly to be drooping. Death, so much death, the stench of it crosses the ocean and fill her nostrils. Sometimes he feels like a ghost, Sid told her a few days ago, when he wakes up in the morning. They were taking a stroll in her parents’ garden after Sunday lunch and he’d explained it to her, how he has to make sure that all of his body is there, in the bed; his hands, his feet, everything still in its place, and to check that his is not one of the hundreds left behind on the beach. It scared her, this revelation from Sidney, whose brash demeanour and good humour had impressed her when he came home after the war; if he couldn’t become an officer he was going to become a doctor, he’d said, and give her the life she deserved; and she would no longer have to work at the Alabama Dry Dock, which was where she’d worked during the war. But what if I like working in the shipyards, she’d said, and right until that day in August 1945 she’d packed up her lunchbox in the morning and left the house in her overalls and sensible boots.

The morning after she’d seen Sid, and the other Mobile boys who were the first to volunteer, off at the station, she’d marched straight to the local war office to sign up for home front duty. Sid’s sister, Katherine, volunteered at the Red Cross, selling donuts and lemonade to troops coming through Mobile by train, but Mary had wanted to get her hands dirty. “I want to make bombs!” she’d said to her parents. She was seventeen, and what did she know about bombs, her father wanted to know? “I know that I want whichever one falls on Hitler to have my name on it,” was her response, and her parents knew better than to argue with her. She was just out of school and with the scarcity of good men on account of the war, her parents were happy to let her work – dangerous though it was – knowing fully well that life had been put on hold, and that seeing all the uniformed men coming home would be enough to turn her head and set up house well in time, before she was 25. In the end, rather than the bomb factory, Mary had found work in the Mobile shipyards, building destroyers and tankers from the keel up, and those that bore the lovely name ‘Liberty ship’ that would be sent to the Pacific, where she knew Sidney was serving. “Tinkering,” she called it; she saw it as just one step up from rambling about in the junkyard between the rusty cars as she had done as a child. She saw the population of Mobile swell with workers attracted by the boom in the shipbuilding industry, as if a giant wave had risen from the ocean and thrown them all onto the docks, clinging onto their toolboxes like shipwrecked sailors to lifebuoys.

Work had been hard. Her nails had split, her hands become calloused, and her lower back use to ache almost permanently. But she had loved it, Mary reflects, as she studies her nails and discovers a black rim underneath one of them. And after work, she and Katherine would go and see the war movies in the cinema, and sigh and think about those brave boys overseas, though the letters Katherine received from Sidney made it seem like the Japanese put up much more of a fight than the Germans that Erroll Flynn and Ronald Reagan fought off on screen, who could apparently be killed just by wisecracking. She remembered when the Joneses three doors down lost a son in Europe and drew all the shades down, and kept them down for what must have been two weeks at least. Here’s death, she’d thought then, every day as she walked past the grim façade and it followed her to the street corner, where she turned and it would slip her mind again – just as she thinks it now, feeling it gently tug on Sidney’s other hand, away from her. What business does Eugene Sledge have to talk of death at her party?

She likes him, of course, but she’s not sure if she can understand the ways in which he has changed. There is still a friendly light in his eyes when he looks at her, but it is dimmer than it used to be. There are bursts of spontaneous, carefree laughter, but these often end quickly, as if they have offended somebody who isn’t there. Sid and Eugene were best friends growing up, she knows that, but the war seems to have forged them together as tightly as a rivet to a sheet of aluminum. During the first few weeks of their courtship, when she and Sid would wander down the street and stop at a café for a cup of coffee, she would bring a book and Sid would sit down to write to Eugene. “He always wrote to me,” was the explanation he offered, “and receiving letters when you’re overseas is like manna in the desert, Mary, believe me.” She’d believed him. Mrs Jones was always sending her boy in Italy crates full of vegetables she’d grown in her garden, seemingly unaware that her presents would perhaps be underway for months before they reached him – if they weren’t plundered by a nimble-fingered, hungry serviceman somewhere along the way. Sometimes Mary had found herself wishing she had a beau in the war, as other girls did, whose happiness when they got a letter from them or an exotic souvenir, a brooch or necklace they’d picked up somewhere, she envied; but then she felt guilty, for she well knew the anguish those girls were in when news came from the region where the boys were stationed, or when weeks passed without a letter and the girls had no way of knowing whether they were still alive.

“They probably stole those necklaces, anyway,” Eugene said when she ran into him one day after Sid had just left and they’d started talking about the war. He had read books about the previous one and knew perfectly well what soldiers got up to in the houses of civilians. This had shocked her; good, clean American boys, doing their duty, which everyone knew included killing Germans; but would they stoop to stealing? She felt very aware of her naivety in Eugene’s presence, and when they parted she went straight to the library to borrow _All quiet on the Western front,_ where she learned for the first time what happened  between men in a war. “We don’t talk much, but we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other than I should think even lovers do. We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death,” she read. She had never thought about it that way before. More than lovers? But the moment she saw Sid’s face as Eugene stepped into the room, she knew; and it fell into place. Two tiny sparks of life.

But here is death, and she takes Sid by the arm, gently, and they begin to dance. He smiles down at her but she feels that his mind is elsewhere. She sees his eyes slide towards Eugene, who has taken up his position by the wall again and is drinking what looks like a White Russian. She sees him set down his glass, and slip out of the room. The milk has coated the inside of the glass a veined white, and despite the stuffiness of the room she shivers when she looks at it. When the next song starts, Katherine comes up to her; Amy Driver has had too much punch and is throwing up in the bathroom. Mary unclasps her arms from Sid’s neck, kisses him on the lips and goes off with Kate.

When she returns, Sid is gone. She goes into the living room, where her father is sitting on the couch. “Daddy, have you seen Sidney?” she asks him.

“I just saw him go outside with two glasses,” he replied. “I thought he was going after you.”

Mary walks down the hallway and takes a shawl from the coatrack, wrapping it around her bare shoulders as she steps outside. A breeze makes the paper lanterns dance; she shivers, not knowing whether to go inside or stay here, and pauses, feeling a sort of lapse in the tides of her body, evening passing into night, and her eyes growing used to the darkness. She scans the sparsely lit garden, trying to locate Sidney among the groups of people scattered across the lawn. Clouds of smoke from their cigarettes circle upward from the little congregations as if they were standing around a stove. Mary descends the steps that lead up to the front door, takes a deep breath, and calls out, “Sidney?” People turn around to look at her and she feels their looks acutely as she stands there, wrapping the shawl tighter around her, feeling suddenly forlorn and out of place in her fancy dress as she addresses a crowd of silent people and buzzing, rustling, chirping animals. There is no reply. People turn back to their conversations. She stands there a little longer, then throws up her hands and goes back inside.

Eugene’s brother Frank asks her to dance and she complies, putting her hands on his shoulder and the small of his back, feeling the scratchy olive-green wool of his dress greens under her fingertips. Frank asks her if she is enjoying herself and she replies “Oh yes, absolutely, and yourself?” and he replies in the affirmative, and she says that she’s got a girlfriend running around here somewhere and would he like her to introduce her to him? He says he would like that very much, and any girl who was a friend of hers had to be as good as gold, and she feels her cheeks heat up in a way she hasn’t felt since the first time Sid called her up to go walking with him a few months ago. When the song ends she goes to fetch Maureen from the living room and introduces her to Frank, and as she leaves the room again she picks up Eugene’s dirty milky glass and takes it to the kitchen, where she runs hot water from the tap and scrubs the glass frantically until it is sparkling clean again. She turns off the tap and looks down at her hands, which glow red and pulse painfully from the hot water. She dries them off and goes back to the dining room.

She goes outside again, and purposefully strides down the lawn, moving between the groups of people and asking them if they’ve seen her fiancé. “I’ve lost him,” she says, and cracks a wry smile because as she speaks the words, she feels them imprinted on her heart. _Has she lost him already_? Oh, but the night is velvet-black and filled with sounds, and she takes off her shoes and feels the grass between her toes. Moths flit around the lanterns, those foolish bugs that can only see what is bright and joyful in front of them without realizing it will kill them if they try to seize it. Young couples are slowly circling underneath the trees, the wind blows snatches of conversations towards her, the Spanish moss sways. She wants to dance. Not in the stilted way they move in the dining room indoors, spinning like porcelain dolls, but in the way she and her girlfriends at Dry Dock used to do of an evening, when they got off early and joined their male coworkers at the bar in the harbour. The smell of beer-soaked wood, mingled with dirty smoke and steel; they’d rush into the bathroom to wipe away the streaks of grease they’d missed when changing out of their overalls and put on their lipstick. She would never forget the evening a girl came running in and told them in an excited whisper that Hank Williams had just walked in; apparently he  also worked at the Mobile docks. They hurriedly finished their toilette and went back to the bar, where a crowd of workers and soldiers had piled in to hear the country star sing. That night she danced to “Move it On Over” and “Jambalaya” and until her feet burned and her hair slipped away from the bobby pins she’d put in. She’d clung to many a sweat-soaked workman’s shirt and even received a thin-lipped smile from Hank himself, catching his eye while swaying to “Beyond the Sunset”.

And now, Mary thinks as she walked down to the terrace, feeling the sun-saturated bricks warm and scratchy against her bare feet, what’s next? The question Sid’s asked her has only one answer, and has an inevitable subclause. “No more tinkering,” she can hear her mother say, with the undeniable undertone of relief at the thought of her only daughter marrying off so young, to such a good man, a fault-proof recipe for a happy life. Sidney will make a good husband, she thinks; she would allow him to go running off every now and then, as he has now, as long as he allows her her evenings out to go dancing downtown. And Eugene – what will become of him? She feels guilty when she thinks of her vicious thoughts earlier, and the roses drooping – his murmuring heart, she smiles to think of it, which propelled him all the way across the ocean to join his best friend in the war. He was heroic, no doubt about it, but he never spun it as a way to get girls. She realizes now why he's in civvies tonight.

Suddenly, she wants Sid with her more than anything. “Sidney Philips!” she cries out again. This time her tone is commanding, her voice bold. _Where is he?_

To her surprise, Sid emerges from the shadows between the trees on her right. He sees her stand with her arms akimbo and rushes towards her. “Everything okay, Mary?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.” He halts next to her and gently raises a hand to tip her chin up. She looks into his eyes and unaccountably feels tears start in her own. She turns away, pretending she has something in her eye. She is tired, suddenly, and doesn’t feel like explaining.

“Thought I’d come out for some fresh air.” He smiles and puts his arm around her, gently turning her back towards the house. She remains standing. “Where's Eugene?” _Outside there is just the night, and all around us, death._

He explains: “He was feeling ill. I had to see him home.” She nods. She believes him. She closes her eyes and angles her face up, feeling him bend towards her, and waits for him to kiss her. When he does, she tastes milk on his tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Claire for beta'ing/cheerreading! <3  
> Hank Williams is one of my favourite artists, definitely check him out if you want a feel for 1930s/40s southern United States music. He really did work in the Alabama Shipyards during the war.  
> The extract from All Quiet From the Western Front taken from the translation by Brian Murdoch.


	3. The Pretender

_Caught between the longing for love_  
_And the struggle for the legal tender_  
_Where the sirens sing and the church bells ring_  
_And the junk man pounds his fender_  
_Where the veterans dream of the fight_  
_Fast asleep at the traffic light_  
_And the children solemnly wait_  
_For the ice cream vendor_  
_Out into the cool of the evening_  
_Strolls the pretender_  
_He knows that all his hopes and dreams_  
_Begin and end there._

\- Jackson Browne, _The Pretender_

* * *

“Sidney?”

He snaps out of his trance, turning his eyes away from the moths that keep dashing themselves at the window like kamikaze pilots, and back at Mary. Her eyes and her hair and her brooch gleam in the bright – too bright – dining room light. Her parents have illuminated every light source in the room, from the chandelier to the candles dripping wax on the table to the green-shaded spotlight on the grand piano – as if they want to show their guests they have nothing to hide. No dark corners here, they seem to say, and no room for dark intentions.

If there’s any trace of boot camp that still lingers in him it’s an aversion to the glare of electric lamps, which invariably meant waking up to go off on a field exercise at an hour not even God himself would dare call morning, in a darkness that resembled the one before Creation. But Sid had learnt that if he wanted to prove himself, getting up before dawn – never his forte – was the one habit he had to acquire. A little bit of iron in his spine, which he is glad to find hasn’t left him, despite the two years touring the Pacific on bits of sleep snatched at intervals and the dreams that keep him awake here. Almost every night, the velvet darkness and the sounds of crickets and scampering squirrels fool him into drifting off into an apparently peaceful slumber, to be replaced with a recurring dream where he floats on his back in the warm ocean, looking up at the serene blue sky while the sunlight, more merciful than in real life, caresses and warms his skin. Pretty soon, his arm bumps up against something; it’s a helmet, dark with seawater and mottled with salt stains. The hairs on the back of his neck rise up and the water feels cold, suddenly, as he lifts his head and looks around him. It’s then that he drifts up against something else – a corpse. In fact, he is surrounded by corpses, bobbing up and down in the crystalline water, gently pushed towards the shore by the waves. The one next to him has begun to disintegrate, flakes of skin falling into the water, and when Sid looks closely, he sees himself. And the morning light streaming in falls on sweat-soaked sheets, a knocked-over glass of water, and on Sid sat up in bed, panting, his throat raw with a voiceless scream.

Mary turns her head and Sid follows her gaze. Eugene has come in, or snuck in, rather, wearing a plain black suit and ducking his head. As Sid turns he catches a glimpse of himself in one of the mirrors that adorn the four walls of the room. He looks, noting his pink cheeks and Brylcreemed hair, like a toy soldier, primped and primed to be shown off, the buttons and golden thread of his uniform painted on with cheap yellow varnish. Sid feels he might as well have sent out the uniform to the party on its own, to walk around and make empty-headed conversation with the Mobilians, whom he did not find stupid per se before but who seem ready to show off their ignorance now, having followed the Pacific war only through the town paper and the few missives that managed to get home from whichever spit of land they were sent from. They ask him where he’s fought, and when he says Guadalcanal they nod thoughtfully and let the word roll around on their tongue, as if they’re tasting a gum ball that has lost its flavour and they’re trying to recall what it tasted like.

All night the uniform has sat on him uneasily, from the moment he was doing up his buttons in front of the mirror, and his mother came in without knocking and hovered at the doorstep. “My handsome boy,” she’d said, dabbing at a tear, without moving from her spot. Sid hadn’t known how to reply, only that her shaky voice made him want to tear off the jacket so the buttons would scatter across the carpet. Now that he was wearing the shiny bits and bobs he earned while dressed in mud-spattered khakis she was proud to the point of tears, he’d thought, bitterly; but he could still hear the cold disappointment in her reply when he’d told her in 1942 that he wouldn’t begin training to be an officer, but was instead resolved to be on the first ship out to the Pacific, a grunt like all the others. “Sidney,” his father had said, tiredly, “you’re such a bright boy. Don’t you just wanna let the others do the killing?” His mother had looked shocked at his casual mention of this biggest of taboos, this direct violation of the First Commandment, probably having forgotten that that was all war was about. His parents’ reaction to his decision had made him even more determined to go through with it; just because they had always been too proud, too lazy, too reliant on their wealth to make a difference in the world, he was going to show them that _he_ wasn’t. “So just because Hitler hasn’t shot anybody point blank, you think he ain’t killed anybody?” he’d spat back at them, then marched straight from the breakfast table to the recruitment office.

Mary beckons Eugene over. He smiles at her and at Sid, making an effort to appear relaxed though Sid can see he doesn’t feel at ease. He readily begins to talk about an old war buddy and mentions Gwen, and Sid asks how she is, picturing Gwen standing on the quay with her friends, lifting her lipstick-stained fingertips to him in a farewell kiss he swears he can still feel land on his cheek. It’s improper, he knows, to take out that moment right now, like a photograph from a shoebox, and examine it from all angles, while he’s holding his soon-to-be-wife. Melbourne seems like a dream to him now and Mary is here, and she’s real; his fingers brush over the embroidery on the back of her dress and he has to stop himself from sliding his hand down further, remembering the ubiquitous mirrors.

Mary is momentarily distracted by the guests and Sid guides Eugene, who is still chattering away, to the bar, where he orders him a White Russian. The uniform does the walking, people melt away in front of him. One foot in front of the other.

“How are your folks?” he asks him. Eugene shrugs.

“Still badgerin’ me to get a job.” He looks as Sid, then down at the ice cubes bobbing up and down in the milk. Sid remembers the corpse in his dream, and swallows.

“Mother said this morning that I never used to live inside my head like I do now.” Eugene gives a bitter laugh. “They’ve never minded me, but now… compared to Frank…” He nods towards his brother, a walking army uniform if there ever was one, who is standing a few feet away and appears not to have seen them. “Point is, they think I’m ‘different’. And they think it’s a bad thing. All I do these days is think, and…” He shrugs. Sid watches him intently. “They don’t know what introspection means. Go figure, my dad listens to people’s hearts all day.” Eugene sips his drink. “If we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist. And I can’t talk about it, what’s in my head, or in my heart, because…” He trails off. Sid feels a jumble of words and thoughts rise up but the clamour and the light push in on him, and he can’t seem to formulate an answer. He pushes Eugene gently back towards the middle of the room, towards Mary, who is startled out of her reverie, and takes his arm again with a smile. As they sway to the music, Sid sees Eugene slink back to the wall from the corner of his eye, then slip around the corner, leaving his empty glass behind.

After Mary is swept away by one of her girlfriends he goes in pursuit of Eugene, swiping two glasses of punch from a nearby tray. He feels the eyes of the guests on him and all the brass on his uniform may as well be lead; it makes his steps grow heavier. When he steps outside he thinks it can’t be difficult to find Eugene, who even in his plain clothes sticks out at a party like this; and sure enough, there he is, strolling on the terrace with his pipe in his hand. From the boy he left behind, to the soldier he ran into on Pavuvu, to the man he picked up from the station – Eugene seems that rare creature, like the bugs and animals he likes to observe, who learns to adapt rather than die. After the stories he’s told him about Peleliu and Okinawa, it’s incredible to know that he’s still here. Lucky him, thinks Sid. And then: _lucky us._

With the breeze rifling through the tree branches comes a memory of walking through the woods, talking for hours about the world and how they were to change it. How comforting it had been, all the way through the war, to know that his friend, his partner in crime, was waiting for him back home (but then he knew he’d never again know such surprise, such heartfelt pleasure as when he laid eyes on Eugene standing on the beach, the lanky frame he’d know anywhere, with a smile on his face more blinding than the tropical sun). The big city boys, when he’d talked to them during their journey home, would go and drown their experiences in wine and whiskey, in girls and gambling, and be seamlessly swept up and borne away on the river of cosmopolitan life. What is there here in Mobile, he’d thought, but the wind and the sunshine, the green grass and the blue sky, and no Eugene?

Well. There was Mary, in whose voice and actions he saw something of himself reflected; not the knowing of all the answers, but the willingness to figure it out. An anger, too, at those who were content to stay in their luxurious Southern homes rather than roll up their sleeves and make the best of it; and a determination to show their parents, their bosses, that they could make something of their life, too, even if they had the ghosts of war to live with. For that’s how he described them to her, unwilling to make her privy to his horrific flashbacks of grenade-rigged corpses exploding in maggots and chunks of black flesh. _I’m haunted,_ he’d told her at the beginning of their courtship, and somehow, she had understood without asking too many questions. She’d simply nodded, and put her hand on his, and looked him in the eye, and said, _That’s okay._

He approaches Eugene, who looks startled and pleased. Being with him, Sid instantly feels like a boy again; as if he has never held a rifle or set fire to a land crab in his life. And still there are things he knows Eugene hasn’t told him, and still there is that invisible wall between them that makes it hard to go beyond platitudes now. Platitudes are what have kept him going ever since he rotated home; it had been a relief, actually, to be accepted in the normal proceedings so quickly, to show everyone that he wasn’t abnormal, and that he could work, and that he wasn’t afraid. But here is the only person who for years has known what is in his heart, and to feel now that he can no longer tell him about its contents is torture.

They make some small talk about Mary and about dancing, and Sid cannot resist drawing him out; he has always enjoyed getting Eugene riled up when it comes to romance. He thinks of their heart-to-heart on the beach, sees himself in his shirt with the sleeves torn off, looking as if he had been sunning himself for three months straight, hair greasy and dirty. Maybe he’d been too willing to show off how much he had changed, walking around bare-chested and talking about sleeping with girls, and how much he enjoyed hanging out with men his parents would have turned up their noses at. He had noticed Eugene’s furtive looks at his tanned body, how he’d fidgeted next to him when watching that racy movie together with all the other men, and how quiet he’d gone when he’d brought up Gwen. Perhaps he’d been hoping Eugene, too, would want to prove how boot camp had changed _him_ ; but in the end, Eugene’s soft “Okay” had only made him feel more foolish and made it harder to meet his eyes. And when he saw how carefully Eugene tucked back his Bible in his pocket, he felt the iron kernel inside him melt hopelessly at the sight. And that, thinks Sid, as he stares into the dark depths of Eugene’s eyes, hadn’t that, after all, been happiness? And could he let himself chase something so capricious and fleeting? Nothing replaces happiness, he knows – except maybe the comfort of routine.

His thoughts are interrupted by Eugene’s voice, which has turned harsh. “How did all this happen, Sid? I mean, looking at us. Sittin’ at a dance, drinkin’ punch. Not a scratch on either of us.” None that you can see, Sid thinks, though he doesn’t say it; because he knows it’s actually quite simple to forget. There’s the comfort, the bulwark of discipline that, courtesy of the Marine Corps, can help you to get up in the morning, and go to work, and kiss your girl, and do it all again the next day. One foot in front of the other. Measuring out time in cups of coffee, so he can pretend that it’s not slipping away from him, but is his to manage.

“I thought that,” he says, guiding Eugene towards the trees that line the driveway. “Every guy back has thought that. But you just gotta pull yourself out of bed in the morning, and get on with the day. You do that enough times in a row…” He pauses, suddenly no longer sure of his argument, because he remembers his dream, “you forget some things. For a while, anyway.”

He feels Eugene’s gaze and the aura of guilt that surrounds him. Guilt for being alive… and something else, too, that he cannot quite put his finger on. The noise and lights of the party in the distance seem to recede, and he feels his heart pounding in his ears. Surely, they have now reached the moment where they can talk like themselves again, about things that really matter…

But Eugene asks him about the book he gave him – he vaguely remembers something like _When shakin' their bustles like ladies so fine, / The guns o' the enemy wheel into line_ – and he returns, again, to Pavuvu, even though he knows that Eugene is standing right here, in front of him – the noise, the light, the proximity of Eugene’s body forming a jumble of impressions that make the cup of his mind overflow, time spilling out, faster than he can catch it, down the china walls, unrecorded, and he—

“Sidney?” Mary’s voice brings him back, far away though it is, and he turns automatically towards its source; a magnetized needle to her north star. Eugene grabs his arm, and he spins the other way, and this, he thinks, is how it feels to have your heart tugged in two different directions. For Eugene looks at him with so much sadness in his pale face, with the bags of sleepless nights under his eyes that Sid himself knows so well, that he cannot tear himself away. He needs Eugene to know that it was his letters that kept him alive, that in his neat handwriting there lay a promise, a promise of two white-haired men sitting on a bench in Mobile, Alabama, both due at home where their doddering wives keep a litter of grandchildren entertained. Two old men who suffer from rheumatism and shattered hips, who can look at each other and remember a time when they weren’t – when they were on a beach, land crabs scuttling past, pebbles being tossed into the surf. And they’ll conjure up, in the middle of the playground across the path, a vision of the young boys they were and will always be, looking for adventure and getting into trouble; and, walking sticks and tweed jackets disappearing, they’ll see their teenaged, tanned, muscular bodies, forever entwined in what started out as a friendly scuffle but merged quickly into something else – an embrace, surprising in its fierceness, that neither wanted to escape from.

So, before he can stop himself, he tells Eugene about his buddy who buried his knife in a Japanese soldier, slowly, almost tenderly, as if it was a mercy; about the determination to be who he wanted to be and not the blind, desperate person he now often feels he is. He finds himself saying “I miss” what seems like a thousand times, referring to a thousand arbitrary things, when what he really means is, “I miss _you_.” He touches Eugene’s shoulder and feels him tense up, but when he looks him in the eye all he sees is his own longing to be touched. And it all seems so clear to him, such an attainable, inevitable goal, remembering that like his fellow lovesick Marines, he used to imagine that the warm body next to him in his foxhole was someone else’s – that of his friend, whom he missed most of all.

“Maybe we should start writing to each other again,” he whispers, though he cannot, frankly, bear the idea of seeing Eugene so seldom that they have to write to each other to keep up. The punch is going to his head, he knows it, but there seems to be no turning back now, when the face that is so familiar to him and lately so strange is so close to his own. Overseas he would imagine Eugene sitting down to write to him, the loving caress of his fountain pen on the paper, the imprints his fingertips made in the margins. He would leave out the most personal passages, guarding them jealously from Leckie and Runner and Hoosier, who would take up the words Eugene had so lovingly strung together and toss them about like a football. He’s not even fully aware of himself, the words seem to spill out of him as he moves his hand up, slowly, from Eugene’s shoulder to his neck, to the side of his face, and finds himself pausing; the crickets seem all the louder to him, an owl hoots above them, the occasional shrill music note escapes from the open windows of the house. It’s the first time he has allowed himself to be this close to Eugene since Pavuvu, knowing that there was something in him that would make him unable to stop himself when he did. His gaze drops to Eugene’s lips, which are slightly parted, and he says, feeling suddenly certain that _that_ was happiness, and so is this: “I used to think about our lives… a life pretty much like this. Dances, drinking, peace… And it was the thought of the happiness, the thought of this life, that’s what kept me going. I had an idea of… An idea of happiness.”

And Eugene responds: “I believed I’d come home. To you.”

When Eugene kisses him, he tastes milk on his tongue, and the soft aroma of coffee liquor. And he knows that time cannot be measured in coffee, can overrun the cups, which once drained are washed and every drop in them is impermanent. He is so surprised that it takes him a moment to respond, but when he does, it feels long overdue; as if he should have done it on Pavuvu, or when Eugene came to see him off on the troop train, or when they used to stroll about in the woods and there were so many private places – underneath the oak trees, besides the little stream, on the wooded banks – where no one would have found them. But they are safe here, in the darkness, with only fireflies and crickets as witnesses. He cups Eugene’s face, deepening the kiss; thinks of Mary, whose lips are just as soft but whose affection is less readily given, whereas with Eugene he feels as if they’ve been building up to this moment all their lives. He thinks of taking off his jacket, stripping his body bare to match his mind, when he feels something wet on his cheek and realizes with a start that Eugene is crying. The kiss comes to a halt and Sid wipes away the tears with his thumbs.

“What’s wrong?” he whispers, as he feels a shudder pass through Eugene’s body. They still stand embracing, forehead to forehead, and after a while, Eugene replies: “I don’t want to lose you,” in a tone that sounds as if he’s already made up his mind that he’s going to. Sid feels a pinprick of confusion and impatience. _But do you not see,_ he wants to say, _how simple it is?_ How easy it would be to keep up appearances so that we can create room for moments like these? How easy it is to pledge yourself to love, and work, with the promise of redemption? How necessary it is to hold on to each other, to the only one he will make part of his routine, even if they must make do with fifteen minutes on the tram in the morning, going to work, holding hands behind their newspapers? _Isn’t this our pledge?_ Sid thinks, as their breath mixes in the small gap between them.

“What makes you think you’ll lose me?” he asks, but before Eugene answers, Mary’s voice rings out again behind them. Eugene remains silent, and avoids his eyes as they gently unravel. He cups Eugene’s face with his hand, smooth and pale like a pearl and more precious than anything anyone else has ever found on a Pacific beach. “I have to go,” he whispers.

He turns around to see Mary in the middle of the driveway, the humid Southern night teasing tendrils out of her carefully done-up hair, looking as if she’s about to cry. He rushes towards her.

“Is everything okay?” She nods, and looks around.

“Where’s Eugene?”

“He was feeling ill. I had to see him home,” Sid responds, the falsehood rolling off his tongue surprisingly easily. He leans in to kiss her, needing her to tie him down from whichever direction he is being pulled in after all that has happened tonight. He feels her hesitate, pull back, and Mary looks at him with raised eyebrows, as if that isn’t the only lie she has tasted on his tongue.

“What’s really going on?”

“I’m haunted,” he whispers, and smiles. “You know that, don’t you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Claire for reading my draft and commenting! <3
> 
> I recommend listening to the entire Jackson Browne song, which is beautiful and fits the story very well, I think.
> 
> So, it's finished! It's been a real joy writing about these three. There may be more Sid/Sledge to come in the future.  
> Thanks for reading! Comments make my day <3
> 
> Come say hi on Tumblr @red-hot-moon


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